Halleck's New English Literature eBook

Milton’s poetry is not universally popular.
He deliberately selected his audience. These
lines from Comus show to whom he wished to
speak:—­

“Yet some there be that by due steps
aspire
To lay their just hands on that golden
key
That opes the palace of eternity.
To such my errand is.”

He kept his promise of writing something which speaks
for liberty and for nobility of soul and which the
world would not willingly let die. His ideals
react on us and raise us higher than we were.
To him we may say with Wordsworth:—­

“Thy soul was like a star and dwelt
apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like
the sea,
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free.”
[11]

SUMMARY

The Puritan age was one of conflict in religious and
political ideals. James I. and Charles I. trampled
on the laws and persecuted the Puritans so rigorously
that many of them fled to New England. Civil
war, in which the Puritans triumphed, was the result.

The Puritans, realizing that neither lands beyond
the sea nor the New Learning could satisfy the aspirations
of the soul, turned their attention to the life beyond.
Bunyan’s Pilgrim felt that the sole duty of
life was to fight the forces of evil that would hold
him captive in the City of Destruction and to travel
in the straight and narrow path to the New Jerusalem.
Life became a ceaseless battle of the right against
the wrong. Hence, much of the literature in both
poetry and prose is polemical. Milton’s
Paradise Lost is an epic of war between good
and evil. The book that had the most influence
in molding the thought of the time was the King James
(1611) version of the Bible.

The minor prose deals with a variety of subjects.
There are argumentative, philosophical, historical,
biographical, and theological prose works; but only
the fine presentation of nature and life in The
Complete Angler interests the general reader of
to-day, although the grandeur of Milton’s Areopagitica,
the humor of Thomas Fuller, the stately rhythmical
prose of Sir Thomas Browne, and the imagery and variety
of Jeremy Taylor deserve more readers.

Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is
the masterpiece of Puritan prose, written in the simple,
direct language of the 1611 version of the Bible.
The book is a prose epic of the journey of the Puritan
Christian from the City of Destruction to the New Jerusalem.

The Cavalier poets wrote much lyrical verse, mostly
in lighter vein, but the religious poets strike a
deeper note. The work of these minor poets is
often a reflection of the Elizabethan lyrics of Donne
and Jonson.

John Milton, who has the creative power of the Elizabethans,
is the only great poet of the period. His greatest
poems are L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, Lycidas,
Comus, and Paradise Lost. In sublimity
of subject matter and cast of mind, in nobility of
ideals, in expression of the conflict between good
and evil, he is the fittest representative of the
Puritan spirit in literature.